Musing on threads and sausage factories

[Ozzard]

This is general chit-chat - not necessarily HH-related (though it *is* board-related), not as strong as a rant, but certainly something where I'd like to change the world! See the discussion on the HHPlace died thread for background on this. I'm splitting it into this thread because it's certainly no longer relevant to the original topic of discussion in that thread.

In my view, discussion can fall into a number of categories. There's technical discussion: how to solve a problem being a classic example, where someone poses a problem and solicits solutions. There's general conversation, where (usually) someone starts a discussion and the discussion then broadens as people bring in other points. And there's whimsical discussion, where the conversation lurches from topic to topic, with no rhyme or reason beyond the whim of the participants at the time.

Further, discussions have a range of persistence - from idle chit-chat at a party to videoed and archived presentations and panel discussions, via discussions on text-based forums like this.

Finally, for discussions that happen to be persistent, there's a range of reasons for people to wish to view them: typically either to contribute, or to obtain information.

Why's this relevant? Because forums like HHPlace make a few choices for their contributors, and it's sometimes worth checking whether the way in which we use the forum matches the way in which the forum is designed to be used. For example:

• Admin policy allows all kinds of discussion on here; a few areas are restricted in content, but most allow general discussion. A good thing IMHO.
• Discussions in threads are persistent.
• The forum is therefore usually persistent for any discussion between three or more people. There's a way to do group discussions via PM (name multiple recipients), but it's not smooth.

This means that threads of normal discussion are likely to drift off-topic over time. Annoyingly, the way that happens is that someone replies to a point in an earlier post. It's rather like a string of sausages - the discussion is sort-of chunked, but joined to earlier chunks, and to get the context you have to follow back along the sausages. And it's not always obvious a priori when to cut the string of sausages and start a new thread.

This issue is at least as old as email. An interesting question, however, is whether it's actually a problem. Clearly it's bad for Q&A-style discussions, but I'm not sure whether it's so bad for general and whimsical discussions.

I'm posting this for interest - inter-person communication's a pet subject of mine, and we have a number of folks on this forum who are keen observers of human nature and human interaction. Anyone care to develop it, or shoot me down in flames?

- Peter

[chris100575]

I'd be inclined to agree with you, how many times have you been sat in the pub with friends and the conversation has carried on in a linear fashion on one subject? Conversation by its nature tends to meander, often ending up in a completely different place from where it started, as people digress slightly to a related subject. This only needs to happen once or twice for it to have moved on to something completely different. Chris

[jmc]

I have had such meandering conversations include an analysis of "how we got here" -- sometimes more than once. That, of course, is not necessary here because all of our "tracks" persist in the older portions of the thread involved.

[chris100575]

I do sometimes have a habit in spoken conversation of making leaps from one topic to another that is related, but it isn't always obvious how until I get to the end of what I'm saying. Worse is when I make two or three of these jumps in my own mind which does tend to lose people. Oddly enough my cousin and I think so much alike that we can follow the unspoken jumps, which really confuses people! Chris

[dr1819]

From the other post which probably spawned this thread:

"If nobody can stay on topic"

(I suspect this will be moved - fair enough, but for the reasons I describe below I'd prefer to keep it in the same thread as admin's message - and that's the nub of the problem).

This is a perennial complaint in any threaded collaboration system. It's sometimes difficult to work out where a conversation diverges from the nominal thread topic - especially where people make side comments that trigger responses. And it's frequently useful to keep the history of the communication, even when the topic is not so much turning a corner as corkscrewing.

I've been on the Internet for over 20 years now, starting with Usenet when the number of newsgroups was still in the low hundreds. I've run a social communication system (in my case a MUD) since 1990. I've not yet found any software that "does what I want" in this area! When writing my own software for such things, I've played with the notion that threading is "soft" - that each message stands on its own and can be placed as part of multiple threads, can spin off a new thread (even in a different area) and so on. A tapestry, rather than a series of threads all going in one direction. This is one reason I tend to reply to one point in one post! It's very flexible, but requires considerable discipline on the part of the posters, or a certain amount of cultivation from the moderators.

A question to Admin, or indeed to the moderators: are there any facilities in this new software where normal posters like me can start a new thread linked into an old one by the system, rather than having to post twice, once in the new thread linking back (with links that are sometimes broken by forum upgrades) and then once in the old thread linking forward once you know the URL of the new thread? Such a facility might make people more inclined to split threads when there's an obvious divergence, rather than carry on because they're scared that their fellow contributors won't find the new thread and link it to the current one.

Excellent points. My first dial-in BBS, in 1986, allowed for threads to branch off. Although it was dial-up, and phone lines were expensive back then, my friend and I had four incoming lines. When connected, even at just 9600 baud, this text-based system that ran on a dedicated 286 was fast! Faster than most BBS's.

I'm not sure which one it was, but both QuickBBS and TurboBBS come to mind. I was an admin on a different BBS that ran the other one.

When SLATE first came out, one of the Internet's first message forum sites, it didn't have branching capability, and so was really a disappointment. Following the branch was very easy - just tab to it and hit enter. The default was to always follow the root thread.

[Dr. Shoe]

From the other post which probably spawned this thread:

Excellent points. My first dial-in BBS, in 1986, allowed for threads to branch off. Although it was dial-up, and phone lines were expensive back then, my friend and I had four incoming lines. When connected, even at just 9600 baud, this text-based system that ran on a dedicated 286 was fast! Faster than most BBS's.

I'm not sure which one it was, but both QuickBBS and TurboBBS come to mind. I was an admin on a different BBS that ran the other one.

When SLATE first came out, one of the Internet's first message forum sites, it didn't have branching capability, and so was really a disappointment. Following the branch was very easy - just tab to it and hit enter. The default was to always follow the root thread.

Eh?

__________

[Guy N. Heels]

From the other post which probably spawned this thread:

Excellent points. My first dial-in BBS, in 1986, allowed for threads to branch off. Although it was dial-up, and phone lines were expensive back then, my friend and I had four incoming lines. When connected, even at just 9600 baud, this text-based system that ran on a dedicated 286 was fast! Faster than most BBS's.

I'm not sure which one it was, but both QuickBBS and TurboBBS come to mind. I was an admin on a different BBS that ran the other one.

When SLATE first came out, one of the Internet's first message forum sites, it didn't have branching capability, and so was really a disappointment. Following the branch was very easy - just tab to it and hit enter. The default was to always follow the root thread.

Howzatt?

[dr1819]

Howzatt?

Slate didn't have branching - the old BBS I ran did. In fact, from what I can tell, none of the modern message forums have branching capability.

While this does simplify the management of the board to some extent, careful programming could render that disadvantage moot while providing for a much more natural conversational flow. People branch in their conversations all the time, and just because one person branches doesn't mean that's the way the conversation goes. Often, the other person will pull it back to the original topic, or ignore the branch altogether.

While modern software looks nicer, the older stuff held quite a bit more genious than most people realize.

[bigj3650]

that may well be the case but i believe phpbb or its this peice of software actually allows branching of sorts actually i do believe it was tested on this forum much to peoples stress and anger because the way the threads are made now...we, the developers, assume that your going to keep a topic on track...or at least not make any drastic topic moves... however in saying that there is once peice of forum software out there in the outer reaches of the internet that ONLY uses branching...the name of it escapes me at the moment but it does still exsist and is still getting upgraded and modifyed but is keeping to its "branching roots" lol sorry couldnt help myself with that one.... cheers J